Jan 31
L and I have been playing the Lumines Live demo. It’s strangely addicting. It’s way overpriced at 1200 points (that’s like $15!), but it’s a fun game to play together.
The Escapist listed a few new games coming soon. Of them, I’m looking forward to Paperboy and Worms. Band of Bugs sounds interesting and Castlevania would be good if I were into that.
Hopefully, though, they’ll all be adaptations and not ports. While I agree that nostalgia is nice, I’ve found that you can never go home again. Frogger looks horrible. Surely it’s not that difficult to reproduce the classic gameplay in Frogger using nicer, bump-mapped textures in 720p using a 3D top-down perspective.
Jan 31
While I haven’t read through all of these articles yet, it sounds like exactly what I was referring to in my Auxiliary Pervasive Gameplay and (unfinished) MMO For The Common Man articles.
Google maps of the game world, Wikis, and web-based mini-games are exactly the kind of auxiliary features that online games need. I often visit the Encyclopedia of Arda when I’m in the mood to get immersed in a fantasy setting. While not a Wiki, it’s a great source of information on the setting. I’ve mentioned the Elder Scrolls Wiki before. If the LotRO Wiki is half as good as that, it will be impressive. I’m on the fence about the player web pages and ‘blogs, though. On the one hand, it would be fun to read ‘blogs where the player journals his daily adventures. On the other hand, MySpace in Middle-earth would soil the experience.
Hopefully, it will all be done in a way that keeps the feeling of immersion. After all, isn’t “There and Back Again” just a diary/journal/’blog? What did Bilbo and the dwarves do in their downtime on their way to the Lonely Mountain? Web-based mini-games could represent this very well: brewing potions to practice your alchemy skill, shooting targets or hunting deer to practice your archery skill, or even tending in-game crops to practice your farming skill (a’la Harvest Moon).
Monster Play is also something that I’ve talked about before. I love the idea of being able to switch into a normally AI-controlled mobile and give other players a challenge. It offers a chance for run-and-gun-then-respawn play without worrying about corpse runs, lost equipment, and XP drains. It can also offer fun roleplaying opportunities.
This could be the MMO that gets me back into MMOs. I’ll definitely keep an eye on it and cash in my Beta invite. At $10/month, it plucks at the heartstrings of the tightwad gamer and the lifetime fee ($200) is also enticing.
